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Wednesday, 13 April 2016

No-one likes risk in business. Consumer
surveys, consumer testing for products, pre-screening for films and other ways
of delving into the customers mind are big business because no-one wants to
invest flipping great wodges of cash into Batman V Superman and then find out
it’s a turkey – whoops.

Risk as a greater concept however, is actually
a rather wonderful thing. The experiences that really matter in life are the
new ones – starting school, travelling abroad, falling in love – and they’re all
full of potential danger and therefore risk. But, once completed, regardless of
the result, you may feel vindicated, courageous, alive. You may have bruises
(to both your body and your ego), but it was worth it for the stories you can
tell afterwards. Risk is what makes life worth living, right?

I worked as a games designer for 15 years
in total, on titles including LittleBigPlanet PSP, Need for Speed: Most Wanted plus
lots more that never saw the light of day, because the title was seen as a risk.
And that’s the bit that really sticks in my mind: ‘what if?’ What if the title
had been saved/fixed/put into full production? What if it had been a hit? How
can you know a game’s playability value when no-one outside the building has
actually played it? I believe that there’s an ‘A’ class bug (not a feature) in
the process used my large developers aiming to create epic triple A console
games: risk aversion. This is understandable because of the stakes: large
budgets and hard-won reputations. But surely, getting the game in front of
consumers while still at the early stages of designed sheds light and clarity upon
a player’s experience, right? If the only people who play the game are those
who see it every day for several hours then there’s no fresh perspective. Is
becoming more and more familiar with your own work really an advantage? Or does
it mean your view becomes narrower and narrower?

The further any developer goes through the production
process, the larger the collection of work becomes, so the more painful it is
to let go of it, and the further they are along the road of committing to a
particular style and set of resources. Consequently certain parts of it – and
this is true for all sorts of projects from graphic design to West End
productions – remain purely because so much time, money (and love) were
invested in them, and NOT because they merit inclusion by contributing
meaningfully to the final product. Then it comes out, gets a 7/10 on metacritic
and the process starts all over again, with a determined ‘THIS time we’ll get
it right’ muttered by those in charge. Repeat.

However, the lumbering giant of large
developers can eaily be out-manoeuvred by the champion of Game Creation
Agility*: indie devs.

Indie devs are nimble creatures. Being able
to quickly test prototypes on consumers means useful feedback at a point when
changes can be made easily – like at the pencil sketch stage before the painter
commits to oils – because it’s only bare bones, and the work of a handful of
people, not a team of 100. Plus, your test case player doesn’t expect a
polished product at this early stage because, well, you’re an indie developer. No
offence, but there isn’t a well-known reputation and anticipated budget
associated with it.

*’GCA’
should be an industry term. It isn’t, but it should be.

The indie dev answers to no-one (until they
receive investment, which is a different kettle of ball games) so is able to
get vital feedback early on from potential players (the people who matter),
instead of receiving feedback at the end of the production process, when tons
of hours of work has been resigned to the bin, hearts broken and dreams
shattered on the opinion of one or two people who probably won’t play – and
certainly won’t pay for – the game as a consumer.

This is the beauty of experiencing games
from the indie dev scene at events like Develop – you can play something in
production that is still evolving, and created with utter love and devotion,
not as the result of a several meetings about the company’s target player
demographics and what the marketing strategy is for the company approaching Q3
2018.

I can’t wait to play the indie games at
Develop, to talk to the people who are actually creating them, and to continue
to be utterly inspired by not only their hard work, but their dedication to
embracing that scariest creature of all: risk.

Jon Torrens is a
communications coach and will be talking about pitching skills at the Pitching & Funding Workshop on Tuesday 12 July.